A computer program just ranked the most influential brain scientists of the modern era

A computer program just ranked the most influential brain scientists of the modern era

By John BohannonNov. 11, 2016 , 9:45 AM When it comes to influential neuroscience research, University College London (UCL) has a lot to boast about. That’s not the opinion of a human but rather the output of a computer program that has now parsed the content of 2.5 million neuroscience articles, mapped all of the citations between them, and calculated a score of each author’s influence on the rest. Three of the top 10 most influential (see table below) neuroscientists hail from UCL: Karl Friston (1st), Raymond Dolan (2nd), and Chris Frith (7th). The secret of their success? “We got into human functional brain imaging very early,” Frith says. Getting in early made it possible to “be first to do many of the obvious studies.” The program, called Semantic Scholar, is…